by Jacqui Rose
The door to the farmhouse was open as David Gillespie reached it. He stood in the doorway and knocked. Sarah Kerrigan turned in the dark room. She had a mop in her hand and the floor was wet all around her. She was a slight, tall figure, with dark brown hair, and a fragile face. She was pretty, most people would have said, but there was something more than pretty in her dark eyes and her dark, sun-brown skin. Her face was the only thing that seemed anything like bright in the drab kitchen. She dropped the mop into a bucket of water and dried her hands, that didn’t need drying, on her apron.
‘Hello, Mr Gillespie.’
She might have been surprised to see him at any other time, but not now. Nothing that had happened in the past days left any room for surprise.
‘I heard you were here, Sarah.’
‘Someone has to be. There’s stock to tend to.’
‘I’m sure someone could do it.’
‘I can do it myself.’
She looked down at the floor for a moment.
‘I keep cleaning it, but there’s still blood. I can still see it.’
‘I’m sorry–’
‘I’m sorry myself, Mr Gillespie.’
‘I wanted to see what I could – to see what happened that night.’
‘Well, you’re not the first visitor I’ve had wanting to poke around the place to see where Donal died, but you’re the first one to say it out loud.’
David smiled. ‘I hope I’ve got a better reason than morbid curiosity.’
‘And what would that be?’
‘There are people who don’t think Michael killed him.’
‘I wish to God they were right.’
‘You don’t think they are?’
‘I’m sorry my husband’s dead, Mr Gillespie, though I wouldn’t pretend I haven’t wished it enough times. If I’m honest I wouldn’t be so sorry at all if Michael Burke hadn’t been the man who shot him. He shot him because of me. He shot him because I told him – I told him what my life was like here. As if I hadn’t done enough to him already. And because I said–’
She stopped. There were no tears. It was beyond that.
‘And what if he thought you did it?’
She stared at him, not yet understanding.
‘What if he thought you killed him?’
She looked at him curiously. It hadn’t occurred to her that it wasn’t as simple as it seemed. It hadn’t occurred to her that the man she loved might not have come to the house that night and might not have shot her husband.
‘If he thought you’d killed him, do you think he’d say he did it?’
‘I think he’s mad enough for that.’ She said the words sadly, tenderly.
‘And did you?’
She looked up, startled by the easy way he asked the question.
‘Some people say you wouldn’t be capable. But anybody’s capable, if they’re pushed far enough. And you’ve been pushed, I’d say, in every way.’
‘I wish I had. I wish–’
She gazed down at the floor. There was nothing more to say.
David was still in the doorway. He walked into the kitchen.
‘Do you know where they found his body?’
His brusqueness seemed to snap Sarah Kerrigan out of her reverie.
‘He was here.’ She pointed at the mop and bucket.
‘On his back, on his front?’
‘They said on his back.’
‘You didn’t see him?’
‘They’d laid him out on the table by the time I was here.’
‘And where was the gun?’
‘On the floor too, somewhere there.’
She pointed back towards the door.
‘Not near him?’
‘Not very. Why?’
‘Well, an accident might be a bit hard to take, but if there was a struggle, a fight, even if Michael did it, it might change things in court. What about the furniture? Did it look like there’d been any kind of fight in here?’
‘There was a chair knocked over, where he fell.’
‘And where was the shotgun kept?’
‘Right by the door, where you came in. It just leant there.’
‘What about the cartridges.’
‘There was a bag hanging next to the gun. They took all that.’
David walked slowly round the room, looking at the floor, looking at the wall behind the table, where there was still shot embedded, but not much. Kerrigan must have taken almost all of it. Even without seeing the body there was little doubt that the gun had been fired straight into him.
‘Why are you doing this?’
‘Father Boland asked me. He’s a hard man to say no to, and when my wife came back from Baltinglass, she said I shouldn’t, say no that is. I don’t know why she did, but I’m not always sure why Helena says a lot of things. She doesn’t always have a reason she can explain, yet she’s usually right.’
‘Does Father Boland believe Michael didn’t do it?’
‘He does.’
‘He tried to stop me marrying Donal. He tried hard to.’
‘Maybe that wasn’t such a bad idea.’
‘I did what I had to.’
‘It’s not my business, Sarah.’
‘Michael was in England then. I didn’t know he was going to come back. I thought – we both thought – we weren’t much more than children – our lives had gone separate ways – he said he’d never come back. And after my father died – there wasn’t a way to keep the farm – there wasn’t a way to keep anything for my mother, my brothers and sisters – there was only Donal. He knew why I married him. I didn’t hide it. And I tried, I did try–’
*
‘For fuck’s sake, David, what the hell are you trying to stir up here?’
In the back bar at Sheridan’s Inspector Riordan was irritated. He liked a drink with David Gillespie. David had been an inspector in the Dublin Metropolitan Police and that gave him the sense that there was at least one other person he could talk to, even if they never really spoke about the past. The burden of leadership sat uneasily on Gerry Riordan’s shoulders; the office on the first floor of the Garda barracks was more isolated than a lot of men would have let it be; but there were reasons. Inspector Riordan had been in the Royal Irish Constabulary. Like David Gillespie in the DMP he had worked after the Easter Rising as a servant of the Crown, trying to keep some separation between himself and what was going on all around him. Faced with a war he wanted no part in David Gillespie had walked away from the DMP, prepared neither to betray the men he worked with to the IRA nor to betray the IRA men he knew to the British. Gerry Riordan had survived the War of Independence in the ranks of the RIC, but he had been forced to take a side. The information he had passed to the IRA was never important; he never knew what they did with it. He didn’t ask. But he did know there were RIC men who had died who were men he worked with, who had been his friends. It was something he would never entirely forget. Now he was part of a new police force, the Free State’s Garda Síochána, full of younger men who would never believe that anyone who had been in the RIC could be trusted. The fact that he may once have sent out men he knew to be shot, even if he had chosen to speak of it, wouldn’t have been enough.
‘I’ve had all this from Father Boland already. It’s bollocks!’
‘Well, if it’s bollocks, then it’ll be plain enough that’s what it is.’
‘You know what you’re doing?’
‘I’m checking you haven’t missed anything, Gerry.’
‘And what about Sarah Kerrigan?’
‘What about her?’
‘You think it’s a good idea to give her the hope that Michael Burke isn’t going to trial?’ Riordan lowered his voice. ‘And that he won’t hang?’
‘Is that what you think?’
‘Look, he says he walked up there to have it out with Donal Kerrigan and they’d a blazing row. They’d already had rows since Michael came back from England last month. There’d been a fight in here that ended up out i
n the street. And I don’t doubt what was already a bad match for Sarah was the worse for all that. Donal Kerrigan had a name for the way he treated his women, whether it was Josie or Sarah. And it was a beating he gave Sarah last week that was the last straw for Michael. That’s what he said to me. She’d walked out of the place and gone to her mother’s, but it was only a matter of time before she was back. So Michael Burke went up there to tell Donal if he touched her again, it’d be the last time he touched anyone so.’
‘That’s what he said?’
‘That’s what he said. It couldn’t be plainer.’
‘So was there another fight?’
‘No. What Michael says is that Donal just sat there and laughed at him. He was pissed enough. He’d been the whole evening in Doyle’s. He said he’d do what he liked with his own wife. You knew the man yourself.’
‘It’s a pity there was no one else to tell him to keep his hands off her.’
‘I’ve done my share, David. He’s been warned enough times.’
‘The warnings didn’t do much for Josie. They wouldn’t for Sarah.’
‘What’s between a husband and wife is their own business. That’s not only most of the law, it’s what the world wants. If I tried to take every man who slapped his wife about to court I’d be a laughing stock. It’s not my job.’
‘So what happened next? Donal and Michael?’
‘The gun was by the door. Michael picked it up. He took two cartridges from a bag and he put them in it. He told Donal he meant what he said, and when Donal just kept laughing at him, he pulled both triggers.’
‘I see.’
‘Then you’ll see why he’d be very lucky not to hang as well.’
‘So you’re assuming after Jimmy Furlong saw Michael Burke that night, standing by the gate, then walking off, that he went back to see Donal. Or had he already been there? No one saw him anywhere near later?’
‘No. Who’d be there to see anyone? But he went back.’
‘When?’
‘Ten, eleven, he’s not sure. The mood he was in he wouldn’t be.’
‘What about these fingerprints?’
‘They’re on the shotgun?’
‘That’s hard.’
‘It’s hard enough to put his head in a noose,’ said Riordan shortly.
Stefan said nothing for a moment. Then he shook his head.
‘When I used to look at these things, when I was going through the reports from detectives, I always used to look hardest at anything that didn’t make sense, because most things did. Even when you’re looking at something you know is a pack of lies, it makes sense as a pack of lies. You’d look at a dozen reports and what twenty-five witnesses had to say and what a couple of suspects had to say about where they were, and it would all make a great story, or maybe several great stories. People said different things. People saw different things. You wouldn’t expect them all to say the same. But sometimes there’d be things that just weren’t right, that didn’t fit any of the stories, that you couldn’t even fit in with the lies you were hearing.’
‘You’re wasting your time, David. As for what you’ll do to Sarah–’
David Gillespie cut him off. ‘The fingerprints aren’t right, are they?’
‘The fingerprints are the end of it, David, even if he denied–’
‘Just Michael Burke’s? Is that it? Not a single other print?’
‘Who else did you have in mind?’ Riordan smiled, shaking his head.
‘I had in mind Donal Kerrigan and maybe Sarah. If Donal owned a pair of thousand pound silver-inlaid Purdeys he kept in a locked box, I might believe he had them so spotlessly clean that there was never a fingerprint on them, and he’d take them in and out of the box with a pair of linen gloves on. But the gun a farmer keeps by the door for shooting vermin, without a fingerprint from the people who live in the house? Does that sound right?’
‘What sounds right is that Michael Burke’s prints are on it.’
David Gillespie shrugged, picking up the two glasses.
‘We’ll have the one we came for.’
As he walked to the bar he could feel his heart beating faster. When Father Boland had told him about the fingerprints at Kilranelagh he had only heard what was damning; he hadn’t taken hold of it until just now. But somewhere the oddness of it had been fermenting in his mind. For the first time he had more than what the priest had heard in Michael Burke’s confession. It wasn’t much. It was barely anything at all. But he had it.
When he left Sheridan’s David Gillespie rode his bicycle out on the Kiltegan Road, on to the turning up to Kilranelagh. His mind was racing. The priest was right. He had got no further with Gerry Riordan of course and despite the fact that it was the inspector who had arrived at the pub to show his irritation at David’s interference in matters that didn’t concern him, when they parted it was David Gillespie who was the more irritable of the two. They might have left both the Dublin Metropolitan Police and the Royal Irish Constabulary behind them years before, but Riordan’s inability to look further than the end of his own nose (and a couple more drinks than David would normally have taken) only confirmed for ex-Inspector Gillespie what had always been the received opinion of the DMP; if you needed to find a pig-ignorant culchie in a uniform that didn’t fit for some reason, all you had to do was stop an RIC man and you had one. The shotgun had been wiped of prints. It was the only possible explanation. And unless Michael Burke had wiped it clean of any other prints, then picked it up again just to put his own prints, and only his, back all over it, someone else had done the wiping.
Only one car passed him on the Kiltegan Road, a dark saloon, somewhere past the hospital. He rode on to Woodfield and Kilranelagh, still angry with Gerry Riordan’s bloody-minded lack of imagination. He was aware of a car behind him, slowing down. There was a rear lamp on the bicycle, but he was pretty sure the oil had burnt out. He glanced back into the car’s headlights to wave it on past him. The dark saloon pulled round him and as it passed him it stopped, so suddenly that he almost rode straight into the back of it. A man in a long coat, his hat pulled down hard over his brow, opened the front passenger door and got out. David was tempted to tell the driver what he thought of his braking, but he assumed they were lost.
‘Are you looking for somewhere?’
The man in the coat walked forward.
‘Mr Gillespie?’
‘It is.’ David looked at the car. ‘Didn’t you pass me on the road?’
‘We’d like a word if that’s all right with you.’
The words were polite, as words, but not the way they were delivered.
‘What about?’
The man put his hands in his pocket. As he did the coat opened; in the dim light from the bicycle’s front lamp something metal caught. David saw enough to know it was a pistol. He knew enough to know who they were.
‘I think you’ve got the wrong man.’
‘We’ve got some questions. We won’t keep you long.’
‘You better ask them then.’
‘Get in the car.’
‘Oh, no!’
The man took his hand out of his pocket and opened the coat more.
‘No one’s going to hurt you.’
As he said it he put his hand on the gun.
David let the bicycle fall against the ditch. He walked to the car with the man and watched him open a rear door. He got in; the door shut. The man with the gun climbed back into the front passenger seat. The driver turned off the car lights, but the engine was still running. He turned round to David. The collar of his trench coat was turned up. The brim of his hat was turned down to. It was near enough to a uniform. It was now very dark.
‘I told your friend, you’ve got the wrong David Gillespie.’
‘What were you doing at Donal Kerrigan’s today?’
‘Kerrigan’s?’
It was an unexpected question. It wasn’t that he had any questions to expect, but what the IRA had to do with him asking quest
ions about how Donal Kerrigan died wasn’t easy to get hold of. He felt slightly reassured though. The car wasn’t moving. There was no one next to him in the back. He knew enough, from the old days and the not so old days of the Civil War, to know that this had to be what passed in IRA circles for an informal chat.
‘You know what happened there last week?’ said David.
‘Yes.’
‘You know a man’s confessed to the killing?’
‘Michael Burke.’
‘I don’t think he did it. That’s what I was doing there.’
There was silence for a moment.
‘And what business is it of yours?’
‘Well, if he keeps on saying he did it, they’ll probably hang him.’
‘So you know who did do it, do you?’
‘I’ve got no idea.’
‘You were a DMP man, is that right?’
‘A long time ago.’
‘Old habits.’
‘I was a policeman, yes. Maybe the man needs some help that way.’
‘Those aren’t the old habits I meant, Mr Gillespie.’
‘I left in 1920 for God’s sake. It wasn’t my war.’
‘And you think that war’s over?’
‘Do you have to pull people off the street to argue about the Treaty with now? I’m a farmer. I don’t need any opinions about anybody’s wars.’
‘Then you need to stick to farming.’
‘I’m trying to help a man, that’s all.’
‘So what did you find out?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing’s good. Kerrigan’s dead. If I were you I’d leave it at that.’